OurFounder & CEO

Jack Manning Bancroft is the CEO and Founder of AIME, an award-winning social movement that uses mentoring and imagination to unlock the potential of marginalised youth to create a fairer world. He is also the Founder, Executive Producer and Host of IMAGI-NATION{TV}, and a puppeteer.

AIME, founded in 2005, is an imaginative educational program and a volunteer mentoring movement - a social network for good.

IMAGI-NATION{TV}, founded in March 2020, is a weekday TV
show that puts a mentor in the home for every kid, every day.

Jack, a proud Indigenous Australian from the Bundjalung nation, founded AIME in 2005 at the age of 19, with the goal of finding a solution to Indigenous inequality in Australia. Driven by imagination and audacious kindness, he re-engineered the concept of mentoring. He developed a cost-effective and scalable model that brings university students together as volunteers to mentor marginalised and minority high schools kids so that they complete high school successfully, go on to university and ultimately, into fulfilling careers.

Over the past 16 years, AIME’s mentoring tools and techniques - its Imagination Curriculum, of which Jack has been the lead designer - have helped transform schooling for thousands of marginalised kids.

Jack’s vision is to unlock the AIME Imagination Curriculum for every school in the world and train teachers to be mentors so we can achieve educational parity and beyond for marginalised kids across the Earth’s surface.

Jack holds a BA in Media and Communications from the University of Sydney. He was awarded the Stanford Australia Foundation Dyson Bequest Scholarship in 2013 to attend Stanford University’s flagship Executive Program. In 2016, he received an Honorary Fellowship from Western Sydney University and the same year, became the youngest person in Australian history to receive an Honorary Doctorate from the University of South Australia.